Download Transcript: Text

It is September 27, 1726, in Godalming, Surrey. A 25-year-old servant and farm-worker, wife of an impoverished cloth-worker, is in labour, attended by her mother-in-law and a neighbour. It seemed like she miscarried a month earlier. "A substance as big as my arm came away, the upper part of it was like a gutt and the other end round as my fist", she would go on to say, recounting the events in December of the same year, but she still appeared to be pregnant. That month she still worked as much as she could in all the pain she was in. At one point she had to go home early, and the others working on the farm with her worked through their lunch breaks to make up the time she had lost so she could leave without losing any pay.

And now here she is, Mary Toft, with Mary Gill, her neighbour, and Ann Toft, her mother-in-law, as from her emerge more guts, and then a liver. Ann shows these strange organs around to her neighbours, none of whom seem to have the faintest idea what they are, and then she sends a jar of the stuff to the surgeon John Howard in the nearby town of Guildford. Howard also has no idea what he's looking at, and decides to make the five mile trip to Godalming see for himself the next day.

Toft spends the next night in agony, and she says "my Mother brought away some part of a monster which she said was the trunk of the body." Next comes a leg, then more miscellaneous flesh.

Howard shows up the next morning, and is as perplexed as he ever was by the limbs, organs and chunks of flesh seemingly generated within his patient. He examines her, finds nothing out of the ordinary, and takes the body parts away with him.

Two weeks go by after Howard leaves, and Toft, now in so much pain she can barely get out of bed, of course becomes the talk of Godalming, with the neighbours speculating about what these strange body parts might be from. Some say a rabbit, others a cat, either way it's very odd. And then a foot comes out, and then a jaw. Ann fetches Howard, and he removes a whole rabbit's head.

A few days later much the same happens, and this time it's a rabbit's foot, and this whole dynamic continues for a few more days, Mary Toft forcing bits of rabbit out of her body and John Howard pickling them in spirits.

This whole time, of course, Howard has been writing to all his medical contacts, especially Henry Davenant, at the court of King George I. Davenant visits, looks at some of the rabbits, and goes back to London. Through Davenant, presumably, the affair ends up coming to the attention of Nathaniel St André, a Swiss surgeon with a questionable reputation, who had been appointed surgeon to the King mostly because he spoke German (King George I had been parachuted in from Hanover after they'd banned Catholics from inheriting the throne but then run out of Protestants with anything but the most tenuous position in the line of succession, and didn't speak any English at all). St André shows up in Guildford, where Toft is staying next door to Howard, accompanied by the Prince of Wales's secretary Samuel Molyneux, who had no medical credentials whatsoever, but also wanted to come and look at the cool weird thing.

St André finds the whole thing very exciting. He examines Toft's reproductive organs, even delivers two partial, skinless rabbits himself, as well as the skin of one of them, rolled up, separately.

He concludes, based on finding 'some inequalities' in Mary Toft's fallopian tubes, that that is where the rabbits are being produced, and that they move from there to her uterus, just the same as a normal human embryo. He doesn't say anything about how he thought the fertilisation was going on. I found it quite surprising that it was possible for St André to feel Mary Toft's fallopian tubes purely externally (I'm not a doctor, but I did check and apparently that isn't generally possible), and apparently I wasn't the first person to find that odd. A contemporary observes "sure he is the first man that ever felt inequalities in the fallopian tubes of a woman through the outside of her belly."

Him and Molyneux get a great deal of amusement from dissecting the rabbits they've delivered, finding that they are basically normal rabbits. They observe that the lungs float in water, which suggests that the rabbit has breathed (although the lungs were smaller and darker-coloured than would normally be expected of a rabbit who had been breathing for a while), and St André excitedly writes that

"In the Rectum of this Animal, which remain'd affix'd to the Body, we found five or six Pellets, much of the same Colour and Consistence as the common Dung of a Rabbet, little Bodies, like dried Fragments, being matted together with a mucous Matter. The like was observed in some other Parts of those Rabbets, which had come away before. In the other Bowels there was a dirty colour'd Mucus, of the Nature of that which is constantly found in the Bowels of all fœtus Animals, and which in those that void their Excrements in Pellets, is commonly hard and dry; but the Matter in the Guts of the first Animal was of an entire different Kind, Colour and Substance from any of the rest, this being like little Filaments of an Animal Substance. In the Middle of the Gut - Ilium - of this Creature, I found a very slender, brittle, white Body, of the Length of half an Inch, which in Shape was like a very small Fish-bones."

John Howard shows St André and Molyneux his collection of pickled rabbits in jars, and they dissect them too, and conclude that the 'praeternatural rabbits', as St André calls them, while mostly looking like fully-grown rabbits, still have some of the traits of rabbit foetuses that you don't find in adult rabbits. This is all very weird, therefore, in St André's own words:

"This, I think, proves in the strongest Terms possible that these Animals were of a particular kind, and not bred in a natural Way."

He has no explanation for the fact that one of them had an eel inside its intestines.

In the words of a contemporary broadside:

"Is this a rabbit or a cat - in troth
Tis hard to say it looks so like em both
But hold - this dung will soon decide the matter
By this I judge it cannot be the latter
And by its weight - I can as safely swear
Tho it has shit - It never breath'd in air.

The doctors here and midwives all consult
If 'tis a foetus rabbit or adult
When up the learned Merry Andrew starts
This Animal (quoth he) in all its parts
Does with a natural rabbit well agree
And therefore it must praeternatural be."

On the topic of how it happened, St André suggests it has something to do with Mary Toft seeing a rabbit shortly before the affair began, running after it, having a dream about rabbits, and craving rabbit meat that she was too poor to afford. Toft's own account backs this up. At the time, a common belief was that mental states during pregnancy could have an effect on the birth itself. This belief goes back as far as various thinkers from antiquity, and is based in the idea that mental states in general can have physical, bodily effects (of course modern science still accepts that this is true, but it's usually more things like anxiety leading to an increased heart rate, rather than thinking about rabbits meaning you give birth to rabbits).

This was associated with other stories about monstrous births. Stories of "monstrous births", were commonplace and had been for a long time, ranging from presumably real births - teratomas, infants with physical deformities, conjoined twins, etc. to fanciful stories - for example, I came across a ballad that appears to be from the late 17th Century, about a monstrous birth of a child with the body of a pig, the head of a monkey and that barked like a dog, and another about a pair of conjoined twins born in Geneva who apparently proclaimed

"I am a messenger
now sent from God on high
to bid you all repent.
Christ's coming draweth nigh."

Often these are presented as cautionary tales - the monstrous birth is a punishment for some sin, often adultery, by the mother - or as general divine portents. Indeed, the word 'monster' comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning 'omen'. These stories became particularly popular in the 16th century, when the relatively new technology of printing meant that sensational stories could be spread very cheaply, and when Europe's religious upheavals created an appetite for apocalyptic portents. Some of the oldest available English broadside ballads are about so-called monstrous births from the 16th and 17th centuries - for example, on a pair of conjoined twins born in 1563 to unmarried parents:

"You that do see this child disfigured here,
two babes in one, disguised to behold,
think with yourselves, when such things do appear,
all is not well, as wise heads may be bold:
But God, that can in secrets show the sign,
Can bring much more to pass, by power divine."

The theory of maternal impressions was a more naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon. Children might be born with disabilities due to the mother seeing someone with a similar disability while pregnant, or the connection could be more tenuous. For example, in 1573 the French physician Ambroise Paré described an incident where a girl was born with an abnormal amount of body hair - what would now be known as hypertrichosis - apparently as a result of her mother looking at a picture of John the Baptist wearing animal skins.

Ideas of direct divine intervention are not suggested anywhere in the Mary Toft accounts, perhaps because these are by educated, rational, materialistic natural philosophers, in the closing stages of the Scientific Revolution, keen to avoid leaping to explanations of the workings of the universe by means of divine miracles when natural explanations can be found instead. But St André, even without bringing up the possibility of divine retribution, is still content with the idea of a mysterious connection between mind and body that he has no chance of understanding in detail.

From apparently observing a praeternatural birth so obviously connected to a specific series of the Mother's thoughts - Mary Toft thinks about rabbits, the idea of rabbits becomes deeply imprinted in Mary Toft's body, that idea transforms her unborn child into a selection of dismembered rabbit parts - St André believed he had obtained conclusive empirical proof of this ancient theory of maternal impressions, and thus evidence of deeper truths about the nature of the mind-body relationship.

But of course this is hardly the most rigorous scientific account, and we're getting to the point by the 1720s where such an idea is controversial, at least among educated people (although there were a few maternal impression holdouts all the way up to the early 20th century, and a well-known late 19th century example is Joseph Merrick, the so-called 'Elephant Man', claiming that his mother was frightened by an elephant).

A few days later, on November 20th, Mary Toft has another visitor, this time Cyriacus Ahlers, surgeon to the King. Ahlers seems to have already basically made up his mind that the whole thing is bollocks from the start, but makes an effort to look like he's interested.

Before meeting Toft herself, Ahlers goes to Howard's house. He's told that Howard is in, and then half an hour later he's told that actually Howard was visiting the Mayor. Another three-quarters of an hour later, Howard appears, dressed in a night-gown, which Ahlers notes is a strange thing to wear when visiting the Mayor.

Howard doesn't let him into Toft's room, but he looks at a rabbit skin from earlier. Ahlers, pursuing a different line of enquiry than St Andre, notices that the skin smells "Very fresh, like the skin of a wild rabbit, just stripped." He asks Howard how the rabbit's skin was stripped off, and Howard gives a hand-waving explanation that it must be something to do with Mary Toft's womb rubbing against her pubic bone. When they are allowed to see Mary Toft herself, Ahlers notes that

"She pressed her knees and thighs close together, as if she was afraid something might drop down, which she did not care to lose."

And then his suspicions are aroused further:

"She was now ordered by Mr Howard to sit down again in her elbow-chair, upon which he examined her, and sat himself down opposite to her upon another chair in a position which appeared to me very uncommon, and indeed not a little suspicious: He made her put her legs between his, and with his knees he pressed hers close together. There was a small charcoal fire lighted in the room, and they were both sitting hard by the chimney, after such a manner that it was impossible for me to observe distinctly what they were doing, and in particular to mind the motions of Mr Howard's right hand."

Howard continues to refuse to let Ahlers examine Toft at all, and Ahlers attributes this to subterfuge on the part of Howard, but Dennis Todd in Imagining Monsters points out that his reasons for this could in fact be completely legitimate. Ahlers had attempted to deliver a rabbit himself and had done quite a bad job of it, Mary Toft saying:

"Mr Ahlers toutched me and said there was something but instead of taking it away he punched it further on, Mr Howard saying why don't you take it away? He answered she must have another pain first and when I had a pain he took it away. I begged Mr Howard to sit down and bring away the rest because that gentleman had put me to a great deal of pain."

Now that he wasn't allowed to examine the patient, Ahlers pretended to have a headache and returned to London, taking a few bits of praeternatural rabbit with him and promising to tell the King all about what he had seen. Howard, according to Ahlers, took the opportunity to tell the surgeon that "He hoped his majesty would be so gracious, when this was all over, as to give them a pension, there being many that had pensions, who did not deserve them."

At this point, Mary Toft had given birth to 16 rabbits.

Next to arrive in Guildford was the prestigious doctor Richard Manningham. He had been summoned at 4 AM by St André, apparently on orders from the King. Alongside his Swiss companion, Manningham arrived at Toft's residence in Guildford at noon on November 28. He carried out similar observations of the others, and put hot cloths on Toft's belly in an attempt to observe the 'leaping' of the rabbits in her uterus. He was successful.

"The motions were various, sometimes with very strong throws cross the belly, especially on the right side, at other times with sudden jerks and risings, and tremulous motions and pantings, like the strong pulsations of the heart, and as I sat on the bed in company with five or six women, it would sometimes shake us all very strongly. The whole appeared to me very different from any convulsive or hysteric motion I had ever met with before."

Manningham, however, was not as credulous as St André. He notes that a membrane that had been produced from Toft's vagina looked and smelt a lot like a pig's bladder, but then points out what St André said, that the rabbits were "not bred in a natural way". He says:

"Why therefore might not this membrane which looks like a Hog's bladder, come also out of the uterus?"

Clearly, if the rabbits are preternatural, this can explain absolutely anything at all about them that is inconsistent with Toft's story.

While Ahlers been careful to make it look like he was taking Howard and Toft's account seriously, Manningham had less tact, and apparently brought Mary Toft to tears with the suggestion that it was a hoax.

The three doctors continued the argument in the White Hart Inn. St André argued that, because the rabbits looked like adult rabbits but had parts that resembled foetuses they must be special magic rabbits, and Manningham argued that the fact that the membrane he had delivered was obviously a pig's bladder proved that there was some kind of fraud going on. St André and Howard eventually persuaded Manningham to keep quiet about his doubts until he actually knew more about what was going on (by which time St André would have published his account).

Manningham wasn't as completely convinced that the affair was a hoax as Ahlers had been. The "leapings", as everyone seems to have been calling them - the apparent observations of the rabbits moving in Mary Toft's uterus - still had no satisfactory explanation, and as such Manningham was convinced that there was something weird going on, although he doesn't ever tell us what exactly he thought it was. It might not have been anything preternatural, he could well have believed an explanation completely in line with the laws of nature (but certainly physiologically remarkable and extremely impressive), i.e. that Mary Toft had actually managed to insert live rabbits all the way into her uterus.

The next day, November 29, the doctors returned to London, and Mary Toft came with them. Next time, we'll be hearing about what happens there.

Thank you for listening, come back next time to hear about how the story continued in London.